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Tax plan should have at least been discussed at meeting

Published 6:30 p.m. CT Sept. 17, 2014

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Supervisor Virginia Lee speaks at Lafayette Animal Control in Lafayette. A tax plan that would have provided more funding for animal control was never addressed at the latest city-parish council meeting.
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The idea of combining mosquito control and public health tax revenues into a public health and safety fund and adding animal control to the mix was a good one. The two taxes usually yielded a healthy surplus and animal control is chronically underfunded.

Too bad the proposal to put the matter before voters in the Nov. 4 election died at Tuesday’s Lafayette City-Parish Council meeting without so much as a second to Councilman Jay Castille’s motion. And thus, there were no comments from the public, either.

A proposed road and bridge tax renewal also suffered a silent demise at the same meeting.

What could have prompted such action — we should say, rather, inaction — on the part of the council?

The plan in its final form would combine an existing 2.06 mill public health tax with an existing 1.5 mill mosquito abatement tax to cover those two operations, plus animal control.

Combining those funds and placing the three operations under one umbrella would allow the agencies the flexibility to funnel money where it’s needed, when it’s needed.

And while two of those agencies enjoy an excess of funding that reaches into the millions, animal control is chronically underfunded. The parish animal shelter is so overcrowded that between 6,000 and 8,000 animals must be euthanized each year.

This plan would have fixed the problem without new taxes. It could have been a win-win.

City-Parish President Joey Durel was on vacation Tuesday and missed the meeting.

Durel wondered in a Daily Advertiser article if it were necessary to “hold their hand to get something done.”

Apparently so.

The plan was Durel’s brainchild. It almost assuredly would have gone differently had he been there to shepherd the proposal through the process.

Did he know whether he had the votes to pass the proposal when he left?

Apparently not.

During the meeting, Chairman Kevin Naquin reportedly said he had questions for Durel and Chief Administrative Officer Dee Stanley, who also was not at the meeting.

Had there been no opportunities before the meeting to ask those questions?

As Durel pointed out, the item was on the agenda for two weeks before the meeting. Was that not enough time?

Maybe not. But Durel had outlined the plan in his State of the City and Parish earlier this year.

Still not enough time?

We expressed our support of the idea when Durel spoke of it in August 2013.

That’s 13 months. It seems like enough time to get some basic facts.

Fortunately, it’s not too late. Assessor Conrad Comeaux said in the recent article that both issues may be placed on the ballot anytime in 2015 and part of 2016.

We urge the city-parish council to take advantage of the very next opportunity to do just that.

Neither measure would create new taxes. And one of them would help Lafayette Consolidated Government make good use of money that is sitting idle.

Rather than dismissing the matters with a wave of the hand, the council should give voters the chance to decide.